Hello.. You might have read some of my earlier posts that Phil put
up for me. I'm an OEM system builder. We've used the Asus A7V
boards ever since they came out. More and more of our systems seem
to have been plaqued with the problem. Yes, sometimes, I have
noticed it right after I installed a scanner. Yes, it was USB.
However, once I took the hard drive off the promise controller, and
put it on the other On-board controller, the problems goes away
mysteriously. I've even removed EVERYTHING from startup in the
regestry, win.ini, etc.. and it still happened, only it took longer
for it to show up. That leads me to believe that it's a problem with
the Promise controller working correctly with the OS. So, when Phil
mentioned what Promise had said about doing an FDISK, instead of
using a third party formating utility such as EZ Drive, or Partion
Magic, that made sence. We use EZ Drive on all our Western Digital
Hard Drive...who wouldn't? a partition and format in under 30 seconds
as opposed to a Manual Partition and Full Dos Format at upwards of a
hour? Well, the past 7 machines I've built, I've done this FDISK
(which will totaly destroy all data on a drive if you are doing it to
a drive that has data on it) and then a full unconditional Format
(which is required after the Fdisk so that you may actually write
data on the drive) and haven't had the problem yet. I did try the
newest drivers from Promise, and from Asus.. The boards all have the
newest flash version of the bios.. So, all we can do is do this full
Fdisk and Format combo it appears. Sorry to sound so pesimistic, but
everybody that's just disabled something in start up, you haven't
solved the problem, you've just found a way to make it not occur as
often. If you don't have an ATA 100 Hard drive, then, you have NO
performance loose whatsoever if you take your hard drive off the
Promise controller, and place it on the other Onboard Primary
Controller, as it will do ATA 66. I will post any other changes that
I come across in the future. Thanks to everybody that has helped in
solving this problem.

-Dave